Original subtitles

Every mum wants their child to be normal.

You wish the best for them, you hope that, from that tiny little bundle,

they're going to go out and conquer the world.

There should be nothing that, at that tiny age, that you should say,

"Oh, you're not going to be able to do that."

Something so bad...

..had changed my child so significantly

that it was going to affect her for the rest of her life.

And she wasn't the only child.

In the 1990s, strange things began to happen

in the small town of Corby.

As a mother, when anything's wrong with your child, you always think,

"Is it me? Is it part of my family line?"

And, then, to think, "Well, we don't know what is."

Mothers began to give birth to children with severe deformities.

We didn't actually realise how big this was.

Because, obviously, around here, things like this don't happen.

As the number of cases grew, the mothers demanded to know why

this had happened to their children.

I wasn't to blame. You were to blame

for the way my daughter was born.

It made me so angry to realise how badly this situation

had been handled.

A toxic soup of dust hanging over a town.

This is the unknown story of the worst child poisoning

case since thalidomide.

This was always going to be an uphill battle.

It was almost like David and Goliath.

A case that changed our understanding

of the dangers of air pollution.

I lived in Corby.

I'd taken a job in RS Components.

We had to be up and on the work bus for, like, 5:30.

And I remember feeling a little bit ropey a few times.

I saw a little line on my tummy.

And I was at the doctor, saying, "What's this line?"

And he looks at me as if to say, "You don't know why you're here?"

And I was like, "No, I really don't! What's going on?"

And that's when he said I was pregnant.

And I was six months pregnant.

So, it left me very little time to prepare for the arrival

of my little bundle of joy.

I always wanted twins, or at least two very close together.

Leo was two-and-a-half.

Which I thought the perfect age gap - wouldn't go into preschool.

And, then, I just went back to work.

And the same day I went back to work, I found out I was pregnant.

It was slightly different, but I wasn't sure

if that was from a girl to a boy.

But suffering from migraines, just feeling more tired.

I thought, "Maybe that's how you carry a boy."

I had Daniel when I was 26.

It was great, you know, and I'd just been a first-time mum,

and having a baby just there, and it was real.

And, two years later, we decided to have another one.

And, erm, Connor came along and...

..just turned our world upside down.

All three mums lived within a few miles of each other,

and all had normal pregnancies,

with nothing in their scans to suggest anything was wrong.

Went into labour early hours.

And, then, I remember my husband noticed something wrong

with the hands.

His thumbs seemed to struggle.

Putting your finger in, then noticing that one stuck.

And one was very, very tiny, like it wasn't attached to him.

And I remember saying to the doctor when they come around,

"What's this? What's happened?"

"Oh, no, that's fine. It's just how they are formed in the womb."

And I thought, "Oh..."

Well, my daughter didn't have hands like that.

It wasn't till a few hours afterwards that I got to see her.

And they said, "She's fine, she's perfect, everything -

"but she's only got three fingers on each hand."

I remember thinking, "OK, that's quite important."

There was at least something that she was not ever

going to be able to do.

It became quite apparent really quickly that they were never

going to give her another finger.

They were never going to make it all right.

And she was always going to have what she's got.

When Connor was born, they gave me him wrapped in a blanket.

Let me hold him, and that.

And I remember them saying something, and Connor's dad was,

like, very upset, but no-one was telling me nothing.

It's as if they were hiding something all the time.

And the doctor came into the room and he said,

"You know, your baby's been born without any fingers

"on his left hand."

I was like, "What do you mean? No fingers on his left hand?"

And he showed me,

and it was really hard to deal with.

I cried and I kept looking at it.

Just had to deal with it, basically.

When anything's wrong with your child, you always think,

"Was it me? Is it part of my family line?"

We don't know what is.

Was there something I could have done differently?

Was there something in my pregnancy in the early stages

that I'd done wrong?

I knew I hadn't done anything wrong in pregnancy.

I just wondered how.

They never gave you any answers.

It's just sometimes Mother Nature doesn't get it quite right.

And that was their explanation.

In 1998, a journalist unexpectedly turned up on the mothers' doorsteps.

Graham Hind from the Sunday Times.

And he come to the door, and he says,

"Are you Susan McIntyre?" I says, "Yes."

He says, "Well, we... You've got a son born with a hand defect.

"We think it's caused by toxic waste."

I was thinking, "What's toxic waste?"

Graham Hind was working with fellow journalist Stephen Bevan

on a mysterious story.

Graham Hind, he had this story about a group of mothers -

all from the same quite small area, all of whom had given birth

to children with very similar deformities.

As Stephen and Graham investigated, they uncovered even more children

born with limb deformities.

The more Graham told me about it, the more I thought

this was more than coincidence.

There was a suspicion that there might be some links

to toxic waste sites in the town.

What was going on with these sites?

What was in these sites?

The waste sites were located on land where the town's

steelworks once stood.

Corby started life as a village.

But, in the 1930s, one of the largest steel plants

in Europe was built.

NEWSREEL: The place is Corby -

a steel town set in a sea of agriculture.

Most of the men came from Scotland to work here.

The giant British Steel Corporation plant dominates the skyline.

Half the town's working population passes through its gates every day.

The Corby community was generated because of the steelworks,

cos it brought a lot of work in.

So, it was the hub of the town, really.

But, in 1980, faced with huge government cuts...

PROTESTORS CHANT

..the steelworks shut down...

CHANTS CONTINUE

..leaving 11,000 people unemployed.

When the steelworks shut down, Corby came to an end, really.

They said it was a ghost town.

Corby Council devised a plan to regenerate the town.

It's not just about closing these works.

The solution is about creating a new Corby.

This tiny council took on the biggest land reclamation project

in Europe with a ten-year regeneration programme

to help bring Corby back to life.

But demolishing a steelworks is a complex process.

Steel-making generates toxic waste that must be carefully disposed of.

There was a lot of activity going on to clear these sites,

and dumping it in these former steelwork dumps -

particularly this large quarry site.

Two of the mothers had been working near the same site

when they fell pregnant.

What was in this quarry and these other dumps?

Could it be linked to these birth defects?

It was just a powerful human story with a real element

of mystery to it.

Despite repeated requests,

the council refused to make any comment.

But Stephen and Graham were undeterred.

You've got to remember, this is the paper that did thalidomide.

20 years earlier, it was a massive, ground-breaking story

exposing the link between a sedative that had been prescribed

to pregnant women and birth defects.

One of the things about this story was its similarity

to the thalidomide story.

After a year working on the case, Stephen and Graham were ready to go

to press with a story suggesting

the birth defects and the toxic waste sites were linked.

The photographer came round and took photos of Connor and photos of me.

And it was just unbelievable, the amount of press.

It was like a roller-coaster.

NEWSCASTER: When Connor Ford was born two years ago, the initial joy

quickly turned to despair.

He was born with a deformed hand.

All I want is answers.

And if it is through toxic waste,

it's got a lot of people to answer to this.

As this story spread, more and more mothers started coming forward.

The phone started ringing, and, very quickly, all these mums

were starting to reveal that there's far more of these children

around than we thought.

NEWSCASTER: Earlier this week, we reported on a startling coincidence.

Three young children born in the same area

with similar hand defects.

Since then, more cases have emerged.

With a swell of publicity, the number of cases was growing.

Six children with limb deformities had now been identified,

and the mothers wanted answers.

Under mounting pressure, Corby Council commissioned the local

health authority to investigate this cluster of birth defects.

But the results of that investigation weren't what

the families were expecting.

MAN: There is no evidence of a cluster in Corby.

I would like to reassure them that living in Corby

and having children in Corby, from the evidence that we have,

is just as safe as having children in any other part of the county.

Threw the report straight across the room at them, and just stormed

out of the meeting, because I couldn't handle it any more.

Just couldn't listen to them.

There were cover-ups, it was such a cover-up.

This is a very small town.

And you're now sitting there, telling me it's not a cluster.

It was like someone was sitting you down in school and telling you,

"This is what's happened, so you will accept that."

With the council claiming there was no evidence of a cluster,

the mothers' fight for answers seemed to be over.

They took us to a meeting,

and I remember saying in the meeting,

"This is just a whitewash."

They treated us like we were mums from Corby.

My first reading the article in the Sunday Times

was complete happenstance.

I was lighting a fire at home.

I started tearing up bits of the Sunday Times to put in the fire.

And, then, I see the word "Corby."

And I think, "Oh, that's interesting."

I knew Corby and had, back in the day, worked in the steelworks.

So, I thought, "I'll look at that." So, I opened it up.

If it hadn't been for my reading that article, I would never

have been involved in it.

Intrigued by the story,

Des Collins travelled to Corby to meet the mothers.

The mothers - whose names were in the Sunday Times -

had been looking for some legal advice,

but they were not sure what to do.

They weren't thinking of suing at the time. They just wanted

someone to look at it, to see if anything had gone wrong.

And that's why I became involved.

Des found us.

He was like our captain.

He kind of grouped us together and focused us.

Cos that was what it was - we needed some focus.

The mothers were quite incensed - they thought they were being talked

down to by the council, and that the report had been produced

to make sure that the mothers gave up and went home.

14 mothers had now come forward.

Convinced they were being stonewalled,

they enlisted Des to launch a legal case against Corby Council.

It's far beyond that which can be dismissed by way of coincidence.

There's just too many people in such a small area.

It may be difficult to prove, but it can be proved.

And we, on behalf of the parents, intend to prove it.

Des had to prove that toxic waste from the steelworks had somehow

damaged the babies in the womb,

and that Corby Council had acted negligently during

the regeneration works.

But the council were unwilling to accept any blame.

There is no cluster.

There is no causal link between the reclamation

and the birth defects.

And, consequently, there is no case to answer.

Chris Mallender was appointed chief executive of Corby Council in 2003,

and, whilst in office, continued to deny the mothers' claims.

Our belief is there is no evidence whatsoever that anybody was exposed

to a significant degree to anything nasty.

Corby was a close-knit town, and the accusations Des and the mothers

were making were not well-received.

You had a council populated by ex-steel workers.

And they were hard-nosed guys, and fully believed that

these toxins can't do anything. "We worked with them for 30 years."

We've seen nothing yet to suggest that there is any link,

however tenuous, between the reclamation programme

and these defects.

Building a case to prove that toxic waste had poisoned the mothers

was hugely complicated.

We wanted to prove that this had happened,

and it could be established in court.

It had never been done before.

And most people, including the council, said, "You're mad.

"You'll never do it."

To stand any chance

of proving the council wrong, Des needed help.

The next stage of the process was to establish what went wrong.

In order to establish that,

we had to put in place a range of experts.

He assembled a land reclamation expert,

a professor specialising in air pollution,

and an expert on foetal development.

You get all the different disciplines working together as one

saying, "Yes, that can happen, that can happen, that can happen."

The first expert he consulted was an epidemiologist

to establish if the health authority report was correct.

Epidemiology is the study of incidents of

diseases in populations.

How many cases of heart disease,

all of that sort of thing - that's epidemiology.

When I read the report, one of the things that struck me

was that the approach had been coloured by the view that perhaps

they didn't expect to find anything.

It seemed odd that so many birth defects had occurred

in such a small town.

Yet the health authority's report concluded the statistics

weren't above average.

Professor Parker was immediately suspicious of how the figures

had been calculated.

What Northamptonshire Health Authority did originally was

they ascertained all of the cases of birth defects

in the Kettering Health Authority area, and, then, they looked to see

if the rate in Corby was higher than the rate

in the whole of Kettering.

But what they did was they calculated the rate in Corby,

and, then, compared that rate with the rate

in the Kettering Health District, including Corby.

So, I didn't understand why they'd done that.

By including the figures from Corby,

it appeared that the health authority had skewed the results.

So, what I did was I looked at the rate of birth defects in Corby,

and, then, I compared those with Kettering Health Authority

excluding Corby.

And what I found there was that the rate in Corby was not only high

compared with Kettering,

but it was high compared with the... really, the rest of Europe.

Professor Parker's calculations showed that during the land

reclamation works from 1987 to 1999,

the number of birth defects in Corby had almost tripled.

DES ON FILM: These children have been deformed.

They will live with those deformities for years to come.

If the council is liable, then it should put its hands up and say,

"Sorry, we got it wrong, we will compensate you."

Professor Parker's report was a breakthrough, but the mothers still

had a long, legal battle ahead.

And they were coping with their children's increasingly

complex medical needs.

The idea, as far as I remember, was to graft a toe from my foot

onto my hand to trial and see if they could use it as a finger.

Lewis, by the time he had his operation, just before he was one.

So, then, he was in a high-dependency unit with his toe

in a bandage, and, obviously, his hands, as well,

for I think about five days.

Anybody who has children in hospital, it's very, very hard.

You know, it's very traumatic.

All I was told was my hands need fixing.

And this is the operation to do that.

It's quite a scary thing for a young child to do.

That was when the first memories going down in the operating theatre,

Mum and Dad holding my hand.

The toe doctors grafted onto Lewis' hand didn't take.

He had four major operations before the age of 12.

But they all failed.

He was due to have another operation,

and Lewis just didn't want to any more.

I think he'd just gone through enough.

And we learned to adapt that way.

So, when it's traumatic enough, you have to say enough is enough.

Well, Connor had a thumb and little buds as fingers.

He had...

..five operations,

and 26 corrective surgery.

First of all, they took the buds off, and, then, they decided to

do a toe transplant.

So, they took a toe off each foot and put it up to the hand.

They at least will have the grip to use to help him with things.

The next step in the case was to uncover how the council had managed

the steelworks redevelopment.

DES: We had to understand the way in which the reclamation

programme had operated.

The councils were very reluctant to disclose

any information whatsoever.

I'm satisfied, from an operational point of view,

that that was a well-managed programme.

We used good contractors.

And it was a sound programme of activity.

Des repeatedly asked the council to hand over documents

outlining how the reclamation was managed.

Families will be helped because we will know precisely what was in

the tips, and when that particular waste was moved.

And we will then be able to determine how it was moved against

the background of how we believe it should have been moved.

We believe that's where the failings were.

His requests were refused.

The council was always going to be reluctant to disclose information.

But, then, the case took a surprising turn.

We were scratching our heads one day when I came into the office,

and on my desk in a brown envelope

was a lever arch file full of papers.

It isn't normal for secret documents to turn up.

It's like something out of a John Grisham novel.

You think, you know, that he writes this stuff, and I quite like

reading it, but it doesn't happen in real life.

But it did happen.

We made further inquiries of the people who we knew in Corby.

And it was indicated to us that a guy called Sam Hagan

might have been responsible - directly or indirectly -

for letting us see the papers.

Sam Hagan worked for Corby Council for over 30 years.

In the early '90s, he accused the council of taking short cuts

whilst redeveloping the steelworks.

But his complaints were shut down.

Years later, when Sam heard about the mothers' case in the press,

he dug out the information he'd gathered.

Here, I've got a handwritten note marked,

"Strictly private and confidential".

And it refers to a telephone call that I got on Saturday,

16th March, 1995.

And this guy identified himself as being a technical officer

with the engineers department in the land reclamation.

He was employed supervising claims of what is known as the toxic ponds.

And the job was to empty these toxic ponds, clear the site,

and they had a plan for doing that.

The council officer that blew the whistle and told me

that the practice was going on,

the safety regulations weren't being observed.

They were playing fast and loose with it in order to do the job

quicker and make money.

And he decided that there's nothing he could do internally,

he had to tell somebody.

Cos this lad knew that if he was known as the whistle-blower,

he'd lose his job. So, he told me instead.

Sam anonymously passed on hundreds of documents,

including the whistle-blower's personal notebooks, to Des.

It was a potential breakthrough, but it would take months to make

sense of so many highly-technical documents.

We're not land reclamation experts.

If you show me a piece of work by a solicitor,

can you say whether that's irredeemably incompetent?

I can tell you cos I'm a solicitor, I can tell what should be done.

But with the land reclamation, that is hugely technical stuff.

So, we're looking at this package and thinking,

"Look, we found this thing.

"This is what's going to...this is what's going to win or lose."

But we don't know what's in it.

The legal case had now been running for over six years.

And the families were facing new challenges,

as their children grew up.

While she's at home and she's only little, that's fine,

because you're there to protect her.

But, you know, soon enough you have to let them go to...

..into the big, wide world.

As the case intensified, Lisa's daughter, Simone,

started secondary school.

What should have been the nicest part of your childhood

probably turned out to be an absolute horror for her.

I would hide my hands all the time, and I would get the odd child

asking me why my hands were like that.

There was also a group of children that used to live behind us in

the next street, and they would be picking on me a lot.

And they would be shouting things from the alleyways.

"Four fingers" or, "Look at that four-fingered freak,"

and, then, run away from me.

And I remember when I was old enough to walk to my dancing classes,

I used to take myself the long way and make myself late for dancing,

because I didn't want to bump into the other children.

Emotionally, mentally, it did affect me.

It changed her from being quite a gregarious, cheeky toddler

to being quite a shy, introverted...

..little girl.

The older she got, she realised that the focus was her hands.

So, if people didn't see her hands, that would be OK.

It's not as if I've got eight fingers that look normal.

They aren't normal. They don't look nice.

Like, that's how I look at them.

Maybe that's why I want to hide them all the time,

because I don't want people to see them, because I'm scared of what

they're going to say.

That was a good throw.

He was a joy to have as a kid, cos nothing bothered him.

He just got on with stuff.

And, then, the bullying started when he was at school.

They say bad things about my hand.

Like...

.."Two-fingered freak."

He just didn't get peace from these children calling him

all sorts of names.

Really horrible, the things they said.

He got bullied that much that he used to break down and cry, and say,

"Mum, I don't want to go out because people are looking at my hand."

He started biting his hand and didn't want it, tried to cut it off.

But I think a lot of it was a cry for help.

All Connor wanted was to be a normal kid, and to grow up to be a man,

and get on with his life.

But no-one ever gave him a chance.

We, as a council, have a huge degree of sympathy for the children

and the families involved, but we seen no evidence whatsoever to link

the very serious deformities some of them suffer to the actual waste

reclamation programme here in Corby.

The implementation of the programme was exemplary.

I just don't subscribe to this view that there was something

terribly wrong with what was done at the time.

I am historically an environmental health officer.

If I've got one area of expertise,

it's contaminated land

and environmental protection issues.

Yes, it sounds a bit strange, doesn't it?

How can you be passionate about contaminated land?

But, at the end of the day,

the soil has got to be right.

Armed with the secret documents provided by Sam Hagan,

Des Collins tracked down Roger Braithwaite, a leading expert

in soil contamination.

I'd got thousands of pages of stuff to read.

Just on site investigation reports alone,

I think it counted over 9,000 pages.

What we were trying to establish was were the wastes

so badly handled that it resulted in a public nuisance

which could potentially cause harm?

And, as time went on,

I realised that there was most certainly a case to answer.

Every process on a steelworks site involves lots of waste.

And, generally speaking, it's a toxic material.

You end up with thousands and thousands of gallons of liquid waste

that you have to put into lagoons.

And these are known as settlement lagoons,

became known as "toxic ponds".

Liquid wastes are the most difficult things to deal with.

Steel is made from iron ore and, during the manufacturing process,

produces a number of toxic chemicals.

These include arsenic, cyanides, mercury, and cadmium.

Many of these chemicals are disposed of in waste ponds.

Now, this was the biggest and most complex development of its kind

in the whole of Europe.

So, needless to say, the people from the government

decided to go and take a look.

I found a letter from the then-head of Environmental Health.

He wrote to the planning officer, and he said these are the chemicals

which you would expect.

He identified all the chemicals that he thought might have arisen

as a result of the waste.

And they offered advice.

The advice included that the contractors cover their lorries

and make sure no dust was created, particularly on public roads.

Every bit of advice that they got from these experts

they just ignored.

Lorries weren't covered.

It's all just draining out of the back of these dump trucks.

And all the roads in the area are just covered in this silt.

And that's where everything went pear-shaped.

Each of the mothers lived or worked within a few kilometres of

the routes these trucks were taking.

You would always hear the trucks go backwards and forwards

when they were moving the mud.

It was just...it was just sludge.

I used to walk to my mum's every day, and there used to be

a lot of trucks passing us, with soil falling on the roads.

And it'd get on my pram wheels that Daniel was in.

And I was pregnant with Connor at the time.

God knows what we were washing off.

You know, when you're at the seaside and you go back to your car,

and there's, like, sand all over the windscreen?

That's what it was like, but it was a, like, orangey-red dust.

My husband come home from work

and his clothes would be a bit more dirty than usual.

We used to say just take them off in the porch, and, then,

put them in the washing machine,

separate from everybody else's clothes.

The work was done so amateurishly, in fact.

Just basically muck-shifting without any controls whatsoever.

The key thing about that sludge - very, very fine particles.

It would have resulted in a tremendous amount of pollution...

..over the whole of the district.

That is just basically a toxic soup of dust hanging over a town.

Now, this is not happening in one week or in one month,

or even one year. It's happening over many, many years.

After months examining the documents,

Roger was certain that the council's mismanagement

of the dangerous toxins had put the people of Corby at risk.

There was a few days, quite a few days where, especially on a hot,

sunny day, you'd be in the office,

and you'd just see it was like you're in the Sahara Desert.

It's like a sandstorm coming along, so we used to shut the windows.

And you'd go out to your car.

It was literally as though you'd driven through the desert.

Tracie Taylor worked in accounts in an industrial estate right next

to the route the contractors used to transport the toxic waste.

When our daughter was born, she'd got a deformed ear.

And, you know, they sort of said, "Oh, don't worry about it.

"It's probably just how she's laid.

"We'll get ENT to have a look at it."

We seemed to be the happy little family.

Noticed Shelby didn't seem to be wanting to eat or drink, or...

..move a lot.

She wouldn't feed.

Doctor came up, took her down for loads of scans.

All her internal organs were deformed.

They just said they could try to operate, but the first operation,

they gave her a 5% chance of coming out alive.

Which we didn't think was fair.

So, we agreed what we'd do is take her off life support.

Within five minutes, she'd gone. She'd passed in our arms.

Like most new mums who've lost a child,

you tend to blame yourself.

Ask yourself, "Was it something I'd done?"

There's her death certificate, showing that she died

at the John Radcliffe Hospital.

After she died, we had a meeting with them to find out why Shelby's

internal organs were like they were.

And we were asked if either of us worked with toxic waste

or chemicals, because that was really the only thing that would

cause them internal deformities.

At the time, obviously, we both said no, because we didn't realise

either of us had been in contact with any.

I always used to think,

"Maybe something...someone's got it wrong."

Like, "Maybe the council are right."

Surely, the council couldn't have done something that bad...

..and that careless to affect so many people out there.

My mum's a fighter.

It might have took a toll on her, but she'd never show that.

I wonder what it was like for her in the early stages.

Whether she actually thought that she'd done something wrong

to make me the way I was.

She had so many questions, and never got the answers.

We were trying to establish that airborne contamination

could affect the foetus.

If you inhaled the material, then it could cause limb defects.

Des now had expert evidence showing that toxic dust

was in the air in Corby whilst the mothers were pregnant.

But there was a further challenge.

Nobody had ever proved that mothers breathing in toxins

could damage a foetus.

It just wasn't something which anyone had tried to show,

tried and failed.

No-one had even tried.

Most of my work is detecting abnormalities,

and I'd done quite a lot of research into birth defects,

when I was approached about this case.

Having established that there was a greater number of these cases born

in the population in and around Corby than one would expect

from national figures,

it seemed only reasonable that there has to be an explanation why.

Dr Penman started by investigating the list of toxins that are produced

during the steel-making process.

I had to work through each one to try and find any published

literature that showed that they were capable of causing these,

or similar, defects inhaled as fine particles.

I often spent weeks and weeks coming across one paper

after another that I thought was going to give us some good evidence.

Often as not, it tended to be a blind alley.

After months of searching,

Dr Penman finally had a breakthrough.

We know that smokers have higher blood cadmium levels

because of the cadmium absorbed from cigarette smoke.

And, so, I trawled the world literature for any evidence

of a greater incidence of limb-reduction defects in smokers.

An NHS-commissioned study on cadmium showed that, in mice and rats,

that it is capable of causing limb reduction defects.

And that was really critical here because this is the sort of defect

that most of these children born in Corby had.

Cadmium seemed to be the prime suspect.

A baby's limbs develop in the first trimester of pregnancy.

Dr Penman discovered that, when inhaled, cadmium can get into

the bloodstream of the mother

and thus interrupt the formation of the limbs.

That was just a wonderful moment.

We really did seem to have a smoking gun pointing at cadmium.

Eight years after the case began,

the evidence against the council was stacking up.

But there was one big question the team still had to crack.

They needed to prove that the toxic dust could have travelled far enough

to reach all of the mothers.

It wasn't a question of whether it could go into the air.

It was a question of, once it was in the air,

how far it could travel.

That is hugely technical stuff.

It had never been established before, but that doesn't mean

it can't be done because someone somewhere is always going to do

something for the first time.

Dust particles, to most people, are just a nuisance around the house.

To me, they are extremely complicated scientific phenomenon.

Tony Cox is an air pollution expert who had worked on other high profile

industrial disaster cases.

He was asked to prove whether the toxic particles could have travelled

up to 3km to reach the mothers.

Those particles that we can breathe into our lungs,

they are likely also to travel a long way in the air.

But, obviously, I had the challenge of proving that to a judge.

I did some calculations.

And I produced a little table.

And that table suggested that particles that were capable

of being breathed would travel

easily far enough to reach the location

of any home in Corby.

With this final piece of evidence,

the team were almost ready to go to trial.

But then came a problem that threatened the whole case.

I subsequently got the defendants' evidence, which concluded that

all the particles would fall out of the atmosphere -

I think the figure was 1.5km.

Several of the claimant houses were actually further than 1.5km

from the source of the emissions.

There was a quite glaring difference between their findings and mine.

I tried to reproduce their results,

and I found I couldn't reproduce them.

And I checked my equations very carefully.

I checked the equations that they said they were using,

and everything seemed correct.

And, yet, the answers were different.

The defendants' evidence contradicted Professor Cox's.

If their calculations were correct, the dust couldn't have travelled

far enough to affect all the mothers.

Worried about the discrepancy, Des confronted Tony.

There was a great deal of tension.

Des is a man who's quite prepared to take on a risk.

But, of course, he's got a lot at stake if it doesn't go right.

Despite this difference between the two experts' evidence,

Des had no choice but to move forward.

All we can do is rely on the view given by Tony Cox.

At that stage, we were prepared to rely on him.

After a nine-year battle,

18 families were now involved in the fight for compensation.

And they were finally ready to go to trial.

We had to get a barrister in place.

We put together this package and sent it to half a dozen

very important barristers and said,

"You have been put into the shortlist, and if you're lucky,

"you'll get this job."

And I think three of them came back and said, "Get lost."

HE CHUCKLES

I wouldn't have wanted to be part of a beauty parade.

Either you want me or you don't want me,

I'm a blunt Yorkshireman, so, er...

HE LAUGHS

My main areas I worked in were clinical negligence,

which is claims on behalf of children

who'd been damaged at birth.

And you only had to meet the families

to realise how they felt, that they'd been let down by the system.

Because this was Corby Council and they were, effectively,

what people regard as respectable,

that they must be right and they must be wrong.

With a difficult trial ahead of them,

Des made a final attempt to strike a deal with Corby Council.

In order to avoid the trial, we put an offer to the council,

to see whether it would settle.

But the council wouldn't look at it.

They were convinced that they would succeed at trial.

At that stage, they had the bit between their teeth

and they couldn't wait to get into court.

The experts have studied all the medical evidence and so on,

and they've concluded likewise, that there is nothing to link

what we did with the cases that have been found.

REPORTER: A group of people who believe their birth defects

were caused by their mothers being exposed to toxic materials

have taken their case to the High Court.

I've had to live with it for 19 years,

I've been bullied throughout my life. I want some answers

and I want to know why I'm like this and I've had to go through this.

On 16th February 2009, after years of gathering evidence,

it was finally time for the mothers' team to battle the council in court,

fighting to prove a case that had never been proven before.

It was just like this little group of...like an army.

Just literally, like, let's go forward, let's have it.

Ten years after their battle began, all 18 mothers

made their way to court.

REPORTER: Arriving together at the technology and construction division

of the High Court this morning, the families are hoping

the three-month trial will allow them to seek damages

of up to £1 million each.

They weren't just there to watch proceedings,

David Wilby called them as his first witnesses.

I'm stood up in this court thinking, OK, there's our team there.

And then there's these council people sitting in front of me

with utter arrogance written all over their faces.

The mothers were given the first chance to tell somebody

in authority what had actually happened.

I think the aspect of their evidence, which was important,

was their fairly graphic evidence about how dirty Corby was

during the time that these reclamation works took place.

I was confident in my answers.

I did it with steely determination.

I wanted the families who had been saying this for so long

to actually be believed and recognised.

It was good, in a way, to say your little story.

That, in itself, just makes you so strong.

What kept us all going was the fact that we knew we were doing right,

and we had to do this for the children.

In response, the council's defence team argued that the children's

deformities were just an unfortunate coincidence.

I remember standing there and them asking me

the most ridiculous questions.

Honestly, I think they were trying to say that whatever happened

to my baby, happened due to something either genetically,

or something I did in my childhood.

Everything we done, everything we said was a challenge.

It was like...

..no, this can't be happening, this is just coincidence.

It was a very daunting day, just being in front of someone

just firing questions at you as though you've done something wrong.

You know, when all you've done is give birth.

What you were able to do was to support their accounts

with objective evidence from the time.

And, of course, this made a big difference because the judge knew

they were telling the truth.

Nobody who was in court on a number of the days could have come away

other than being very impressed by them.

Mums are a force to be reckoned with in any world,

regardless of whether your child has got deformities

in their hands or not.

When that evidence finished,

I think we felt as well, "We've... That was a good start".

Following the mothers' evidence,

each side called their expert witnesses.

The defence grilled Roger Braithwaite, denying negligence

and arguing that the waste material wasn't dangerously toxic.

It was a lot of pressure.

I was in the witness box for three-and-a-half, nearly four days.

The whole process was arduous.

The fundamental aspect of the defence was,

there wasn't the degree of contaminants there

that we said that there would be.

And they made a big point about the fact

that people working on the site were all right.

You know, I'm not sure how many pregnant mothers were working

during the reclamation work.

Roger's gruelling cross-examination left Des and his team concerned.

You get a week into the trial and you think, "Where is this going?"

It's at that moment when you come down to earth and suddenly think,

"This could go so badly wrong,

"and what will happen if it does go wrong?"

During the course of the trial,

the judge visited Corby to see the reclamation site for himself.

REPORTER: Mr Justice Akenhead traced the haulage route of the lorries

that carried the contaminated ground away.

Afterwards, the judge honed in

on the issue of how far the dust could travel.

The important link in the case

was this question of how the dust got to the mothers.

They were relying on the fact it couldn't get there

as their main backup defence.

The judge demanded the parties

resolve the differences in their calculations

before the next day's proceedings.

Once I'd really exhausted all my efforts

to find something wrong in my own calculations,

I thought I'd better have a look more closely

at the foundation of the calculations

that were presented by the defendant experts.

And, so, I had a good look at this equation

and I found that the defendants had not done their own calculations.

All their results had been derived from a German scientist.

When I realised that, I knew I had to get the German paper.

It was clear that if Tony's evidence was to be accepted,

that we had to get hold of that German report

and we had to get hold of it within the space of a day.

After trawling through thousands of documents,

Des' team finally found the German report.

When I got the paper...

..the equation was different.

They had made a mistake.

Part of a mathematical equation had been missed.

And I then knew what the cause was

of the difference in the results between myself and the defendants.

That meant that the distance the dust could travel

was 2km, 3km, 4km.

It was a major turning point because it meant that we could prove

that the dust had got from where Corby were working

into the lungs of the mothers, into the blood of the babies in the womb,

and could have caused the damage

that the children unfortunately suffered.

In April 2009, barristers for each side made their closing speeches.

And Mr Justice Akenhead left to consider his decision.

It was always to get some answers

because it's all well and good saying me, as a mum, I'm strong

and I've brought my daughter up to be, you know, independent,

but, without answers, that really means nothing.

We'd sat down with them all and said,

"This is very difficult litigation. We might lose.

"In fact, accepted wisdom is we will lose".

If a lawyer tells me they've never lost a case in their life,

I say to them, "You haven't fought enough difficult cases".

DIRECTOR: 30 seconds to air.

But if you fight difficult cases, go out on a limb,

you will lose sometimes.

Good evening and welcome to the BBC News at Six.

They were all born with disfigured hands or feet,

and their childhoods were disfigured as a result.

But, today, 16 children and their families

won a landmark legal battle.

REPORTER: The judge said today the council had been negligent

and that that negligence was likely

to have harmed those unborn children.

Within these 400 pages

is confirmation of what so many families have believed for so long.

We didn't actually realise how big the case was

because, obviously, around here, things like this don't happen.

REPORTER: They are going back to Corby tonight

bolstered, upbeat, smiling.

VOICEOVER: You're part of history. It's just absolutely fantastic.

You're just so happy and then you just don't know what to do next

because it's kind of all over and it's like,

"Wow, I feel like I can take on the world".

I now have a reason.

I could confidently say to Simone,

"These are the reasons you are the way you are.

"And now you've got them reasons to pass on to your children".

Not only had we won, there were 30 issues

and we'd won every one of the 30 issues, one by one by one.

And the elation was palpable.

I think the judgment was 90-odd pages or 100-odd pages,

but all you keep doing is reading the last page.

They had shown the council

that they had been right all the way through,

that someone had done something awful to them,

and they had done right by their children.

Although disputing the outcome,

Corby Council agreed to pay compensation to all 18 children.

They were hit with a legal bill of almost £15 million.

It was the first case in the world

to rule that air pollution could harm babies in the womb.

The case of the children in Corby

will be a benchmark for future issues.

I take pride in that, that...

SHE SOBS

..it will help people.

Sorry.

Do I think that this will be the last time

we ever see a case like this?

Probably not.

I think we're too nonchalant about the way we do things.

It shouldn't have to really come to that.

I think we need to be more careful.

Relating to the case, it does make you think,

is there more to this in terms of long-term impacts?

Can it lead to things like cancer?

In terms of future for me, it's quite a worry sometimes.

Connor got his money at 18

and he got involved in a lot of drugs to make his life easier,

but it was all wrong.

He ended up doing three and a half years in prison.

He's two years out now, so he's doing well for himself now.

My confidence came as I got older,

and more so when I had Eva Marie.

She is a really good mum.

She's done a good job.

She's a little bit overprotective, but, yeah...

..aren't all mums?